Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Psychology is the 6th P

When Fast Company magazine first came on the scene in the 1990's it was lauded for its progressive view of the business world, including its insistence that we were entering the age of experience (leaving the information age). This year in an interview with Kevin Roberts, the worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, they returned to that topic by highlighting his concept of "love marks". Kevin said, "A love-mark is the emotional connection you have with a product and it is that emotional connection that allows companies to conquer the world".

Since my undergraduate days in the mid-1980's at the University of Texas at Austin, it has been so clear to me that the same forces and relationships driving psychology were driving brand success. So why do we keep straying from the obvious? Why isn't one of Marketing's 5 P's "psychology"?

Only when someone with some serious common sense comes along every few years, like Lou Carbone (http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1153), do people have a blinding flash of the obvious. People are hard-wired in some respects, have the influences of their family, friends, and community on top of that, and have life experiences that they interpret. Those factors create a series of filters through which people view their lives. These filters manifest themselves outwardly as behaviors. Thus, genes and experiences lead to attitudes, which are manifested as behaviors. Real brand experience work (not just call center monitoring software or user interface engineering alone) identifies the impact that every customer touchpoint has in this cycle. The cycle is significantly shortened, and you must compensate for unknown genetic and life experience filters, but Lou is spot-on in recognizing that the most important factor is understanding how your company makes your customers feel about themselves.

Customer Experience Management Blog Warehouse

My Customer Experience Management blog died with my website when I got into a tiff with my webhosting company. I am trying to dig up all of the old posts and warehouse them here for anyone who was leveraging these ideas and advice to either sell the value of CEM to their organizational leaders or actually practicing CEM in their organization.

Be well,

Darin Phillips